For the past number of years the only books I have read have been technical manuals and training guides. It’s all a bit necessary when you work in IT. You have to keep pace with the changes in technology and all that. Last year I decided I needed to break up the reading with a few non-technical books. I started with Leviathan Wakes from the excellent The Expanse series written by James S.A. Corey. I completed the entire set of available books with two more on the way in the next few years. My intention is to read a few more books this year to break things up a bit from the tech stuff.

Wow, look at what a bit of focus does! We took the course about three weeks ago, a couple of weeks of prep, and success on the exam. I can safely say this was one of the toughest I’ve had to do in a few years. On to 70-698 and MCSA: Windows 10.

I’ve run into this issue recently where software updates don’t deploy successfully to client machines in Configuration Manager but everything on the surface appears to be functioning correctly. I did some digging and found in the WUAhandler.log file there were entries like this:

This repeated every handful of minutes. There are a few different issues that are tied to this but the one that impacted my situation was the WSUSPool in the IIS Application Pools. In my case the WsusPool was in a stopped state. Restarting it allowed it to run for a few minutes then fail again.

The Fix:

Launch the Internet Information Services (IIS) console.

Expand the default server, select Application Pools.

Select WsusPool.

Select Advanced Settings from the Actions pane.

Scroll down to the Recycling section and select Private Memory Limit (KB).

Change the default 1843200 to 4000000. Click Ok.

From an elevated command prompt cycle IIS: iisreset

Launch the Configuration Manager console and navigate to Assets and Compliance and select a sample device.

Initiate the Software Updates Deployment Evaluation from the client.

View the WAUhandler.log file for updated activity and confirm the error messages have stopped.

Back in the “old days” when I was on a team supporting hundreds of servers we would occasionally encounter an issue that we just couldn’t figure out. We were lucky then to have a third level team we could call who had a direct link to Microsoft for support, no questions asked, no credit card required.

We would call them up, or fill in the form on the support website, and a triage tech would call to take some information and then a tech would call. The tech would send us a link and have us download a tool that we would run on the server. The Microsoft Product Support Report Tool would run and gather up, into one tidy package, all of the many logs and settings found on the server and wrap it up ready for delivery to the tech for analysis. We would then be provided with a temporary ftp address where we would send the package. The tech would take a look, stir with whatever magic diagnostic wands they had at their disposal, and provide us with a summary of what they had found. If the results didn’t tell us exactly what the problem was it would often give us a pointer to the direction we should be looking for a possible solution.

That’s gone now.

What you have now is something equally useful and interesting. The Microsoft Support Diagnostics portal gives you pages and pages of typical items that might require diagnosis ranging from Baseline analysis, Exchange Server, IIS diagnosis, Windows Server diagnosis and almost everything else under the Microsoft sun.

So it works like this. You browse to the portal and login with your Microsoft Live ID. Now that you’re logged in browse through the pages of options to find the diagnostics selection you need. You run through the diagnostic process and upload the results. The upload is analyzed and you get feedback that gives you an idea of what is wrong and how to go about fixing it. A handy resource.